The Tear

She kept the photograph to remind her of those blistering summers, of the feeling of his heat between her legs and the foreign weave of his T-shirts brushing against her skin. Hid it from her husband; didn't want to remind him that another man's tongue had parted her lips like a writhing serpent, that she had once been so young and carefree to be charmed by a man who kept his hair long, a man who wove her fingers into stars and pulled her, twirling, giddy, to fields sewn with song and people so in love with the sound of music that their souls floated in a dusky haze above the ground. Black and white, the photo spoke nothing of the blaze of colour that pulsed around him, the ever-shifting hues that amazed and ensnared her in the days before responsibility came tapping at her shoulder.

The banners and the musicians and the long summer nights still came round. One year, her firstborn asked if she could go. She stood in the hallway with flowers in her hair and her boots trimmed with tassels.

That evening she hunted for a picture of her daughter. She tore the edges so perfectly to frame her willowy body and put the two together. Wondered if they looked the same.